“Are you saying you don’t feel safe on this planet anymore? I’m sorry, but we can’t arrange a transfer to Domremy for you. Hollingsworth was one of the last people we sent there. We’ve arranged for shuttles to come by to take some of the inmates to new colonies where we think they’ll be more productive. They must have missed your friend. We’ve even shut down the comlinks to the archive on Domremy, since we won’t have a presence there for the foreseeable future.
“What about the moon base office?” Erica asked. “I hear that’s a pretty nice place.”
“We have no openings at the moon base office at this time, particularly in relation to the Research and Development division that you work in,” Samuels continued. “However, there is a very specific task related to research and development that I’d like to assign you to.”
“Is it not on Earth?”
“Certainly not. However, it does involve a certain…volatile political situation, and if you somehow failed to achieve our desired goals in this position, we would have to ask to resign your position, and all the pay and benefits associated with it, immediately.”
Erica considered Samuels’ request carefully. After turning down the assignment on Tomakio (to her disgust, she learned the rock was overrun by Dissenters) , most of her duties since the end of the Domremy program had been related to Hyperion’s attempts to solve the problem of the plague ravaging Earth, from attempts to change the human genome to make it more plague-resistant to efforts to gather materials from other planets to synthesize into a cure. Her duties had been to supervise a series of fruitless attempts to end the plague’s death toll. Maybe I could have succeeded if I had been allowed to accept those sera offered by the Blynthians. But those weirdos had specified “no profits” and the company wanted all the profits from the greatest product ever produced on Earth. A product that was never produced. Now they can blame me. Erica knew that with another failure she would very likely be considered for termination just as Bill was. Could the new position present a solution to both her problems?
“I’m willing to take the risk,” she said after considering the consequences.
“You will be going to a very important diplomatic post. We want to arrange the situation in such a way that we can obtain some tech that we think could be used to boost our profits in the reclaiming of Earth. Of course, since this position involves governments rather than corporations, you would have to be sponsored by a politician on Dahlgren and ostensibly resign your position with us. On the books, at least. Off the books, you will be remunerated at the level of Assistant Vice-Director III. You’ll see that this will go far on your new planet. We need new angles to exploit off-world and you can help us obtain them. There are military operations, territorial disputes, new colonization by various races, things we need to know about from the inside.”
Erica took a deep breath and made what felt to her the most momentous decision of her life. “I’ll do it,” she said.
It was well beyond the vineyards when Klein began to feel he was being followed again. The Middendorf Hills had already faded to barely discernible humps on the far horizon. It started as a mere intuition, something he couldn’t pin his finger down on. His “plains senses” were so developed by years of travel that he didn’t try any longer to follow logical inquiries about changes in the environment. However, he was aware of something moving along in his wake through the sea of grasses. He began unloading the thallops earlier in the evening, while the suns were still both up, in order to mount up and take a short ride to view the northeast from a slight elevation. The first proof was dimly visible smoke from a campfire. Eventually, riding at different times, he could see lights from the fires and finally a furrow in the prairie about twenty miles back where something was moving. Obviously this was not Locals, since there was no record of them ever using fire. Plus, their movements were either widely spaced bounds or undetectable creeping in the reeds.
Klein began to wonder whether Hyperion had left behind some bounty hunters to track him down. The thought of Kinderaugen operatives even crossed his mind, though the rumors he had heard in the Middendorfs about the plague back on Earth made that possibility almost ludicrous. Could some of Alek’s friends, or even Cashman’s, still be hunting him, assuming that they ever had any? He decided he had to lay a trap, lying in wait as the disturbance in the prairie surface neared his camp. Hearing a muffled humming, he saw at last what had been parting the grasses – a bulky electric vehicle covered with solar panels and a single passenger. The fellow was swathed in a head scarf to disguise his identity or to protect him from the sun, but there was something vaguely familiar about the way he moved as he descended from his perch on the solar truck and nosed around Klein’s campsite tentatively, calling “Hello” in an uncertain way. The fact that he stopped in front of Klein’s tent and hesitated to go inside gave Klein an inkling of who the newcomer might be. Still, he held his rifle on the man and added a note of menace to his voice as he silently broke cover and said, “Turn around slowly and keep your hands high.”
“Don’t shoot! Look, it’s me.”
“Me, who?’
“Oh, yes, the scarf. Let me take it off nice and slow. See? It’s me John.”
“Barber John?”
“Yes, Barber John, Jahangar. Remember? From Site 36? I gave you a haircut.”
Klein pointed his rifle down. “I haven’t thought much about that lately.”
“No, clearly not. My goodness, you have become a hairy beast. I’ll have to do something about that. Right now, I’m just glad you didn’t shoot me. How did you know?”
“The head scarf. A Middle Easterner’s sun cream. And when you hesitated to barge into another person’s house, even a cloth one, then I figured it might be you.”
“I should have expected nothing less. Your preparedness and cunning are legendary, even for a German.”
“So what brings you to this part of the wilderness? Who’s taking care of your little nuclear reactor?”
“Oh, my little Selma has been down for over a year now. I named her after Selma Lagerlof. With all the geothermal, there was really no need for the power, especially since the trains are only powered up once in a blue moon to move large shipments of goods. A Dissenter would rather hike for two days than ride in a train alone. They wanted to keep Selma serviceable, though, in case there might be a future need. So I deactivated her quite completely and put all the rods into long-term storage in a nice, safe vault.”
“Then?”
“Then I was bored as hell. I thought about finding you, just to have something to talk about with my customers in the barber chair, and then when the letter came for you, I had a good excuse to borrow this thing from a neighboring site,” he said, waving his hand at the vehicle.
“What letter, John?”
“From Earth. From a lady who I believe is a relative of yours,” he added, producing an envelope from a pocket in his tunic.
He handed it to Klein, who took it hesitantly, rather astonished that Jahangar could handle so casually an item from a disease-infested world.
“Oh, you needn’t be afraid of germs, my friend. As you can see from all the cachets, it has passed through many security points and been certified sterile before it reached the surface of Domremy.”
Nonetheless, Klein turned the envelope over and over, held it near and far, and scrutinized it as if it were an alien life form he had never before seen. It was more than a cursory investigation. It was as though he had come to doubt that such an object could even exist, as though he wondered if it would dematerialize in his fingers. Only once he had accepted its claim to reality did he begin to examine each and every stamp on the outside of the envelope. My God, he thought, it has my actual name! How could the powers that be pass on such a document? Then, as he looked more closely at the stamps, he saw that many of them were clearly not of human origin. The links with Earth must really be so disrupted that everything depends on alien cooperation now. Lastly, he turned his attention to
a postmark that appeared to be the original, and it read Groneland Nordest. The Danish settlements in Northeast Greenland. Could it be? He tore open the envelope in a sudden frantic movement. Written manually in a hand he didn’t recognize. But the first words slapped him right in the face.
“Dear Father,” it read.
Klein’s jaw must have dropped like a lead weight. Jahangar coughed discreetly and murmured, “I’ve got some things to unpack just now. I’ll leave you to read your letter in peace.” He sidled off towards the solar car, leaving Klein to his tears.
It still seems so weird for me to call you that. But I definitely cannot call you Mr. Klein as I did back on Corlatis. Believe me, I would have called you father sooner if I had known. I almost ran out and hugged you when you left the medical center. I would have if Mother had not held me back and repeated to me that you needed to leave and it would be unfair to stop you. I guess she was right. She generally is. Still, my feelings about all this are a real jumble.
Before I get into all that, let me assure you first that we are both OK. I have been up here in the Arctic Clear Zone ever since I got to Earth. We left Corlatis not too long after you did. By we, I mean most of the epidemiology staff, except for the aquatics. At first, we passed through the anchorage at Tau Ceti and worked there in triage for several months. At that point, nobody was setting foot on Earth. Blynthians, Coriolans, and a lot of other species were delivering supplies to the Exclusionary Zones by air. Then they started to drop in the decon teams of robots and immune species, beginning with your Talinian salamander friends who were given a grant in the tropical Pacific in exchange for their work, and they certainly earned it. We were with the first resettlement contingents sent into the Clear Zones – the Anzac, the Arctic, the Mid-Atlantic and the others. Mother left me here and moved right on to a transition center in Newfoundland and then down to the main triage at Tadoussac. I told her I was ready but she wouldn’t hear of me getting closer to her. It’s stupid, since I earned my MedTechIII at Tau Ceti and I could do most of what she does.
Anyway, it’s not so bad here. I can speak all the languages, except Inuit. They tell me the weather is better than Novaya Zemlya, so I guess I’m lucky. It’s just so boring sometimes. Aside from delivering babies or the odd fractured bone, there’s just not much for me to do. The MedTechI’s get all the immunizations and other little stuff just to keep them busy. To preserve my sanity, I spend spare hours (lots of them) doing boat decon and refurbishing. Some of the boats do nothing but go down and bring back other boats, but they’re going to ramp up fishing pretty soon to help feed the resettlers, so they always need more.
Sorry I couldn’t try to get a comlink to talk with you in person, but there’s still not much of that kind of machinery up here. I usually have to wait for a week even to call Mother down in Tadoussac. She sends you her best wishes. I should say her love, but you know how she is about the l-word. I have to be content with being “cherished.” She never admitted how deeply she felt about being able to work on you on Corlatis and I know she would rather die than breathe a word about it to you. Of course, I can tell because I can read her like no other. She went absolutely hysterical after she told me about you. It took all three counselors to persuade her she hadn’t ruined my life in some way or committed some kind of “sin of weakness.” I know you two weren’t together long. Frankly, she has had men in her life since then for much longer periods. You’re special, though. I don’t think I’d ever be here if it weren’t for you. Well, duh, of course not! What I mean is that I don’t think she’d ever have made the leap to having another child with any other man. That’s not just flattery, it’s true. Anyway, you can understand why it’s me writing, rather than her. The sun would turn pink before she would set pen to paper. I’m just hoping I can corner her into a comlink somehow once technology gets back to normal.
Before I forget, I have some other good wishes to pass along. Torghh is head of treatment in Mexico now. Being 100% inorganic, he can go right into the hot spots looking for human immune survivors and come back through decon in a snap. He’s going to stay on for the duration, he says. Until two months ago, Tatatio was down at Terceira in the Azores setting up a medical college for humans, but he had to go back to Coriolis for the birth of some great-grandchildren. Haven’t seen Ragatti since Tau Ceti, where she did a little stint before disappearing again, but she said to tell you she’s saving something special for you if you get together again and I bet you won’t have to think too long before you guess what it might be.
So back to me. Why don’t I come see you? I don’t even know if you still exist, but that wouldn’t stop me if I could get up the nerve to leave. It’s not that I’m afraid of interstellar. I do like Earth, despite all my complaining, and I think I want to make it my home, but that doesn’t prevent me from taking ship for Domremy, or anywhere else for that matter. I suppose the main thing is fear. About Mother. As good as she is and the people around her, too, there is always a chance, however slim, that she will be infected. As long as there is the tiniest chance of that happening, I’m not going to go farther away from her than we are now. You’ve got to understand that it’s not that I think less of you, but because she is almost all I’ve ever known and certainly all I could ever count on. In a strange way, that goes for her, too. I’m the one thing she has allowed herself, for herself, in her whole life. I want her to know I will be there for her. You will have to wait, if you can bear it.
Please, the one thing I’m asking you is to get in touch with me and let me know if you get this letter and where you are and how you are doing. Everybody in the center on Corlatis used to talk about how impetuous or reckless you could be. Ragatti told me she knew there were people on Earth, that is, on pre-plague Earth, who wanted you killed and that you had trained yourself to always be on guard. Naturally, SHE didn’t think recklessness was a negative quality at all, but I think I share Mother’s opinion on that score. I just hope that before it’s too late, you find out I love you. Yes, I do. I can’t SHOW you that, other than by writing this letter, but you’ll have to believe it on your own. Knowing you’re out there, knowing there’s something in me connected to you forever, little twisty things in all my cells, but also the way I see and think that I share with you, that you gave me – that’s something I never had before I knew the truth. It feels so damn good I just can’t find any other words for it. I love you, Klein, Father. Not like your Entara, not like Ragatti (thank God!), not like anybody on Domremy probably, but like only I can love you. Remember that when things go bad, but above all, remember it when things are going well, too, because I hope they always do. There’s somebody down here on Earth in these slightly frosty old fjords that loves you and just you in that way. Please answer me.
Love, Amanda
Klein just stared at the pages for a long time. There were no more tears in his eyes. Then he stretched back to lie down flat on the ground and stare up at the stars. They were clear in the vault of the sky, hundreds of glowing points undiminished by the light pollution cast by sprawling cities or by the stifling haze of the Europe where he had grown up, endured training, gone to war, and then dissipated his existence in drab offices and bars. He did something he’d never done before in all his years on Domremy, trying to determine if one of them was the same sun that shone on Earth, on Amanda. Is it daytime in Northeast Greenland now? Or is it night and she is like a mirror image of myself, gazing up to look for someone she can’t see? He could distinguish clusters of stars that made patterns of constellations to which the Dissenters had begun to give names. The Hyperion claimants had done nothing but lay this sky out in a grid of dry mathematical coordinates. The Dissenters, however, were more human and they had already filled the heavens with The Thanksgiving Turkey, Buddha’s Tree, and the Good Samaritan. Klein chuckled when he confessed to himself that he was too poor at physics to guess at Earth’s celestial coordinates or the brightness or distance of its sun, so he picked a bright star in the head of the Good Samaritan and
he said, “That is Amanda’s star and from now on when I see it, I will think of her.”
After several minutes, he turned toward the northern horizon a bit to a small star he had had someone locate for him a long time ago, soon after he arrived on Domremy, a star he knew because he had visited its system, the sun of Forlan. “I won’t stop watching for you,” he whispered. “But now, you have company.”
Then he rose with a sigh and went over to the little electrical heater Jahangar had lighted as the suns were setting, to see what he had prepared for supper.
The next day, Jahangar set out all his barber implements and proceeded to attack the rat nests that were Klein’s hair and beard. After spending the last few years looking like a cave man, Klein decided on a buzz cut with a mustache and goatee, giving him a look he had never had before. Examining his new face in the mirror, he complimented Barber John on another success and they shared a hearty dinner, planning to break camp promptly at sunrise and set off down the coast towards the Southern Continent. There, Klein planned to take the ferry from Fielder’s Crossing over to the opposite coast and go on to the Dissenters’ experiment station, while Jahangar traded his slow solar truck for a faster trip back to his home site. During the night, however, Barber John awoke Klein twice in a nervous sweat, claiming he had heard noises in the grass and that he was afraid Locals might be stalking them. Klein assured him that Locals had been shadowing him for months and had done him no harm, but finally he agreed to keep watch so Jahangar could get a little rest. The Iranian, who had brought a Kikkonnen with him and had never primed it so far, set it on ready and kept it by his bedroll all night. Even then, Klein never heard him snoring and assumed that he was too scared to close his eyes.
Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Page 36
